MILITARY: Basilone Road named for Camp Pendleton Marine

WWII hero remembered in road and plaza names

CAMP PENDLETON — A bronze bust of Gunnery Sgt. Basilone sits in a plaza named after him in Little Italy. A road at the north end of Camp Pendleton bears his name. A sign along Interstate-5 near the base tells drivers they are on “Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone Memorial Highway,” leading some to ask “Who was Basilone?”

He was a World War II Marine hero, based at Camp Pendleton, who after receiving the Medal of Honor, the country’s highest military award, went back to fight in the Pacific at Iwo Jima, where he earned the Navy Cross posthumously at age 28.

When Basilone received the medal in 1942 he was said to have responded, “Only part of this medal belongs to me. Pieces of it belong to the boys who are still on Guadalcanal…”

Basilone landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands Sept. 17, 1942 to help defend the beachhead and within weeks was in the middle of one of the fiercest battles of the campaign. His unit, led by Col. Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, was spread thinly along one side of Henderson Field at Guadalcanal, referred to later as “Coffin Corner.”

Just after 10 p.m. on Oct. 24, the Japanese started a heavy attack. Basilone was in charge of two gun crews. A runner reported that the two guns on his right got jammed, so Basilone grabbed a machine gun to defend the spot. He got the guns working, first firing from one and then the other as the enemy attacked from different sides throughout the night, holding back several thousand Japanese soldiers with only 15 men. He ran through enemy-infiltrated territory to get more ammunition and after the battle, 1,000 enemy dead were counted, according to the Naval History Center based in Washington D.C. Basilone was awarded the Medal of Honor and promoted to gunnery sergeant.

He sold war bonds briefly, but wanted to go back to fighting the war. While stationed at Camp Pendleton for training, he met his future wife, Lena Mae Riggi, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. They were married in July 1944 at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Church in Oceanside.

Basilone requested to return to the Pacific Theater and served as a machine gun section leader with the 1st Battalion, 27th Marines, Fifth Marine Division during the initial assault on the Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima.

“The Japanese were strongly entrenched on that Pacific island. They were dug into the cliffs with artillery. There were thousands of gun positions, with underground tunnels connecting them for mutual support—some of the tunnels 35 feet underground,” according to a 1975 article in the Marine Corps Associations publication, “The leatherneck.”

On Feb. 19, 1945, shortly after single-handedly destroying a blockhouse on Iwo Jima’s Red Beach and guiding a trapped tank out of a minefield under attack, Basilone and was killed by a bursting mortar shell.

“Gunnery Sgt. Basilone boldly defied the smashing bombardment of heavy caliber fire to work his way around the flank and up to a position directly on top of the blockhouse and then, attacking with grenades and demolitions, single-handedly destroyed the entire hostile strong point and its defending garrison,” according to his Navy Cross citation.